Friday October 07, 2005

VisualStudio committers vs. Eclipse committers

While at OJ.X on Thursday I had the great privilege of getting to spend some time with Mike Milinkovich. Since MS was there too he wondered out loud how many people MS had working on Visual Studio. Well Rick LaPlante (a General Manger for MS) was also at the show. While I was doing some research on him I found his blog and a very interesting post here. From these numbers it looks like MS has about 432 people involved in the Team Foundation Server which I guess is a big part of but not all of the next version of Visual Studio. Anyway that is a huge team compared to the 60+ committers on Eclipse.

Interesting indeed...

Yes its been a long time, life, new job have been getting in the way of my time to spend on Eclipse.

Monday June 27, 2005

NetBeans Day

I meant to post this last night but got lost in hanging out until too late. Anyway I posted my notes from NetBeans day on my other blog here. It was a cool time and I really enjoyed it.

Update: Sorry for the busted link, coppied the wrong link. Should be fixed now.

Friday June 24, 2005

Java One Schedule

My Java One schedule is crazy but I will have 3 hrs+ in our booth. The press release and schedule is here. If you are going to be there please stop by the booth and say hi!

My detailed schedule including all my over bookings can be found here.

Hope to see you there!

Eclipse Training

Well with my new gig one of the cool things I'll be doing is training in Eclipse. The course is 3 days of Eclipse training. There is an optional fourth day that will have choices like building plugins, using the WTP, programming with EMF and GEF. I'm also planning an indepth course in building plugins as well.

Each participant will get a subscrition to the Eclispe Live book as well as the training.

I'm looking forward to doing training again, its been about 14 years since I did full day training. Back in the day at Meijer teaching Obj-C and Unix.

Wednesday June 22, 2005

Swimming the English Channel - Million Download Challenge

Well its not really that cool but the Eclipse Foundation is encourgaing people to sign up and give to their favorite charity based on the time it takes to reach One Million Downloads. Get the details here.

While this is probably a much better thing to do than send some Eclipse exec swimming across the English Channel, its not nearly as fun to watch ;-)

Tuesday June 21, 2005

Swing implementation of SWT?

A very interesting thread developed yesterday on an old bug yesterday. Essentially someone proposed (a long time ago) that SWT be ported to Swing. Instead of having native controls behind the SWT widgets you'd get Swing controls. Then Eclipse could run anywhere that Swing works. The chief developer behind SWT was against it at first but seems to have warmed to the idea. From reading the thread though it does not appear that the team is convinced that there will be any real benifit from this port.

I hope it makes it better. I'd love to see the Swing controls in various plug-ins that never ported to SWT make it into the realm of working software on the Mac.

Friday June 17, 2005

Eclipse Live Signing @ J1

I'll be doing a book signing at J1 on the Eclipse Live title, Wednesday at 1:30 pm. Hope to see you there!

I'll also be hanging out in the Virtuas booth off and on throught the conference. If you are @ J1 and want to chat please stop by and say hi.

Tuesday June 14, 2005

Eclipse 3.1 - you can help

As you have probably seen the RC releases are happening for Eclipse 3.1. The end game is in effect which means that testing and bug fixing is the main focus. If you have any spare cycles it would be great if you could use these test plans to help the team ferret out any remaining major bugs.

Wednesday June 08, 2005

Eclipse, NetBeans & the big Mo - updated

Well I've been contemplating this posting for several days. It is clear from the website rankings that NetBeans (NB) has some momentum going. I think that is a really good thing for NB to be nipping at Eclipse's heals (after all NB was lame before Eclpse cleaned their clock). I'm not sure though that I agree with Jonathan Schwartz's implication that Eclipse is somehow more of a product that a community, with the 'you can compete against a product but you can't compete against a community' statement.

Now I do agree that a community is harder to compete against. But the community behind Eclipse is rather large as well. As an example googling "eclipse plugins" yields ~176000 hits and googling "netbeans plugins" yields ~350 hits. This huge difference is accounted for by the fact that Eclipse has had a 2 year juggernaut. With 4.0 delivered in December of 2004 NB just turned the corner and started to build momentum. And I suppose that NB is more complete out of the box so there is not as large of a need for plugins. But still, the number of people building stuff for Eclipse is huge.

This is a great time to be a geek and either way the coin toss falls developers win!

[Update] Just noticed this announcement. Strategic partnerships with commercial developers is not everything but it does mean you have momentum.

[Update 2] Thanks to the kind comment Rob Harwood I've got a more accurate picture. Doing a google on "netbeans module" yields ~5450 hits. Combined with the 350 above its about 6K. Not bad at all and much higher than the previous quote. Its still quite a bit lower than Eclipse and I think that still has to do with the 2 year juggernaut. Anyway thanks for the comment Rob.

Eclipse & Community

I have finally had time to explore the world of PlanetEclipse and there is a ton of good stuff there. One set of posts that I found very interesting is from Bjorn Freeman-Benson. Starting with this post and followed by this and ending with this post he argues that building the community is hard but crutial. I totally agree. His by line is 'more than just code...' which is a great reminder of how much open source depends on its community.

Now the really interesting thing to me is that many closed source vendors put a lot of time and energy into building a community around their products. JBuilder for example has a huge community too. Users help each other out with postings to forums, Borland employees help people out by writing articles, posting stuff. So from the 'what happens in the community' perspective they look similar. So what is the difference?

We could easily say 'free' but I don't really believe that. IntelliJ users constantly argue with Eclipse folks that their product of choice is worth the small investment because its a better experience. So why then do people choose to be involved in the Eclipse community, or any OS community for that matter? Well I don't pretend to have a single answer because the answers are probably all over the map if we were to consult with any particular participant. My belief is though that so many contribute to the OS community because there is a feeling of mutual benifit. Since OS is free as in freedom as well as zero cost licenses there is a feeling that you are part of something bigger when you participate. You are not helping a corporation when you answer some questions on a user list or forum, you are in essence building a greater good. In building this 'greater good' you help make the community stronger so that when you need help with a bug you have somewhere to go.

The other really cool thing is that once you help identify that bug and fix it you can grab the next nightly build. Sure new bugs might have been introducted but you get to make the choice. Not possible with your typical closed source product.

I know this is somewhat rambling but I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this stuff since I started my new gig. Again I don't have the answer but from the people I know and my own participation in the MyFaces project the building something bigger aspect of partcipation is at least part of the answer.

Why do you participate?

Sunday June 05, 2005

Back on line...

Well I have no real excuse for not putting any time into this blog for a long long time (8 weeks, yikes). I was in the DC area for 6 weeks straight from March 30 to May 13th. It was very lame being away from home for that long. On the + side I escaped the majority of mud season. I've been home now for 2 weeks and 1 day and I'm finally back in altituide form (we live at 9800 feet which is hard on low landers). It is great to be home!

If you follow my other blog you have probably already read that I've started a new job at Virtuas. I'm really excited about this opportunity because it means I'll have more time to devote to Eclipse and open source in general.

On that note, I finished up my contract for Eclipse Live back in March but I'm going to do another year. The first order of business is to get the book updated with all the cool new stuff in Eclipse 3.1, which should be done by the end of June (around J1 just to rub Sun's nose in it). I'm looking forward to discussing all the cool new stuff in 3.1. After that update is done (mid July I hope) I'll be looking for input from you for what to do next.

On another note I'm now the official Editor and Chief of Eclipse Developer Journal. If you have any input on articles you'd like to see I'd love to hear about them. And if you'd like to submit an article then please feel free to contact me about that as well.

I'm looking forward to re-engaging in our conversation.

Sunday April 03, 2005

Eclipse 3.1 Team Suffers from Curry Overload

The Eclipse 3.1 team has been keeping track of its curry consumption. It appears they are nearing over load :-)

Monday March 21, 2005

Oh SWT Why do I Hate Thee So...

OK so here is another reason to hate SWT...

The problems is the way the thread models mesh together. Since SWT is a thin vaneer over the native GUI widget set (Carbon on the Mac, others on other platforms) it uses the native event thread model. AWT is much more abstract and has its own event thread model. These two models clash. There is a hack possible on the Sun JDK that makes the two play together. To my knowledge no one has found such a hack on the Carbon yet.

That is why the person at pbblog is having so much trouble. Which leads me to the point of the post. Why do we find ourselves here? For some reason IBM/Eclipse and Sun have not sat down to the table and figured out a way to make a 'standardized' hack that makes it possible for SWT and AWT thread models to play nice? In the mean time Mac users are hosed (and I suspect all non-Sun JDK users) with some plugins. Thankfully none of the 'must have' plugins use AWT. But as the first comment on the pbblog entry notes he had a hard time using Apache Digester with SWT.

How incredibly lame is that?

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. Now I'm not against innovation and I'm glad AWT has some competition to make it better. But its about time for someone to come up with a solution that works with Java instead of working with just some nasty hack on a couple of platforms. Write Once Run Anywhere, a pithy marketing slogan or a reason to invest some intellectual capital? I guess its time for folks to switch to give Eclipse some competition.

Ok, deep breathing has brought me back to my happy place^tm, well almost.

Thursday March 17, 2005

Are you using conditional break points?

If you are not you should be. If find these little gems to be priceless when doing debugging on large integrated processes.

After setting a breakpoint open the properties for that breakpoint (right click, choose Breakpoint Properties... You will get a window that looks like this;

As you can see you can type in any expression and the break point will only be triggered if the expression is true. The expression can be any valid java, if its not the debugger is kind enough to break an give you a nice error message about the expression.

Borland Proposes GMF - filling the gap between GEF and EMF

This project proposal looks really cool. Essentially what they are proposing is to build a generative (i.e. code gen framework) system that will take an EMF model and generate a GEF based editor for that model.

As an example imagine the UML 2 project getting a GEF based editor for free. This project (when done) will be a big boost for the EMF.

Now if we could get beyond the stigma that meta-models have perhaps we could get to some really cool tools that really make building software easier. Not that I'm advocating building software with pictures, thats been tried several times and always fails (and I think always will). What I really want is a meta-model that abstracts the particulars so that the code that I write is easier to understand with a picture. The ideal would be a meta-model for j2ee including j2se that has conversion to the more abstract model. The more abstract model would be easier to understand as a documentation tool, not as a coding tool. Anyway I'm on my soap box, I'll get off it now.